York university student union endorses boycott of Israeli academics

ANALYSIS

The Canadian Student Coalition for Palestine has big plans: A joint effort of Palestinian solidarity groups from Canadian universities, it is designed to harness the intense passions of Middle East campus activism with a specific and controversial goal in mind — a university boycott of Israeli academics.

But when the group was created last month, it occurred with little fanfare and hardly any news organizations took notice. In fact, for students looking to push their universities toward policies aimed at ostracizing and punishing Israel, covert and quiet maneuvers have often proven to be more effective tactics than actions that draw publicity.

Certainly recent votes by student unions across Canada suggest the boycott goal is not so far-fetched, despite complaints of blatant discrimination, criticism of sneakily undemocratic voting practices and debate about the wisdom of using schools as geopolitical soapboxes.

With a poorly advertised and lopsided vote last month — final tally: 18 in favour to two against — York University’s Federation of Students decided to join the “Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions” or BDS movement, which also claims support of graduate students unions at York, Concordia University, the University of Regina and the University of Toronto.

Though not binding on the administration or faculty, the boycott calls on York to sell its shares in companies that profit from Israel — York has shares, for example, in Northrop Grumman and BAE Systems, both defence contractors — and to refuse engagement with Israeli academics.

York’s investment policy says that divestment from particular companies “is not recommended as best practice.” Shunning scholars based on their nationality, critics say, is much worse.

“It so fundamentally violates academic freedom issues, for example, to boycott professors,” said Karen Mock, a human rights consultant and spokesperson for JSpaceCanada, a progressive Zionist organization. “They’re saying it’s to boycott a nation, but it isn’t.”

Calling an academic boycott “the antithesis of academic freedom,” she said student promoters of the boycott have reacted to past failures by resorting to “insidious, nefarious strategies to garner support,” such as quick votes and limited debate.

It’s a strategy to disenfranchise people so that votes will go through

“It’s a strategy to disenfranchise people so that votes will go through, so it shows they didn’t have the confidence this would represent the majority,” she said.

Jewish groups at York complained of short notice for this latest vote. Similarly, in 2008, the YFS used a sparsely attended summer session to pass an outright ban on student clubs opposed to abortion, drawing rare criticism from the administration. On this boycott vote, a York spokeswoman said, “As you may know, the York Federation of Students is an independent, autonomous student government and their leadership is duly elected through a democratic process.”

The BDS movement dates to 2005, and like Israeli Apartheid Week, is an effort to explicitly link Israel with the crimes of apartheid-era South Africa, which were brought to an end in large part by international pressure, including boycotts.

Recent targets of the BDS Movement have included Ben & Jerry’s ice cream and the G4S security firm. In academia, the closest the movement came to mainstream success was in Britain, where a boycott has been repeatedly endorsed by the University and College Union, despite questions over its legality.

York, a school famous for its radicals, has been the centre of this campaign before, when the Canadian Union of Public Employees, which represents some York employees, passed a similar boycott motion. Like the student union vote, however, the practical effect was limited, and support was far from universal.

In a key symbolic victory, the University of Johannesburg cut ties with Ben-Gurion University in 2011, a move promoted by Archbishop Desmond Tutu. But it failed to catch on, despite extensive efforts. As legal experts Alan Dershowitz and Anthony Julius once put it, in the context of the British academy, “The fight against the boycott is one aspect, perhaps the most urgent aspect, of the contemporary fight against anti-Semitism.”

The United Church in Canada, the only other major Canadian organization to join the movement, last summer approved a boycott of products produced in the Palestinian Territories, and urged its executive to “explore the wisdom” of divesting in companies who do business there.

“The whole thing [at York] was just fairly mechanical,” said Sam Eskenasi, communications officer for B’nai Brith, who attended the York debate as a former student, and said there was only one student representative who raised substantive questions before the vote.

“I don’t think it’s reflective of the entire campus,” he said. “Whatever the minimum amount of notice is, these groups will try to do it as quickly as possible… It’s just that same group of people who have been there for years. This is their schtick.”

Hamid Osman, executive director of YFS, has been on the executive for at least five years. Reached this week by phone, he declined to comment, citing the group’s “media protocol.”

Student governments run by experienced agitators are the “lowest hanging fruit” for a failed movement that cannot claim a single North American university or government to its side, said Dylan Hanley, associate director, university relations at the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs. He said Canadian universities are in fact moving ever closer to Israel, with increased research collaborations and exchange programs. Plus, faculty unions are typically taken more seriously by their members, who are less prone to flights of ideological fancy.

“These guys [the BDS movement] have failed. They don’t have a mass movement. They have tactics where they can sneak things through in the middle of the night,” he said. “They don’t even represent the opinions of Palestinians.”

Ms. Mock, a former head of the Canadian Race Relations Foundation, said she participated in the South African boycott, to the point of not eating apples grown there, because it was racist, “period, full stop.” But she gave it up when the regime fell and apartheid was no longer in place.

“And so I’m eating Granny Smith apples,” she said.

“It’s easy to convince people that the situations are similar,” she said, but it is a misleading comparison. Efforts to describe Israel as officially racist, in the same way as South Africa, fail the test of academic rigour, she said, reducing a complex problem to cheap sloganeering.

The student leaders of York, however, have taken their stand, and they are evidently not alone.